Animating a Blockbuster: How Pixar Built ToyStory3

Photo: Bryce Duffy

ScreenwriterWilliam Goldman once famously declared that the most important fact of life in Hollywood is that “nobody knows anything.” It was his way of describing a reality that continues to haunt the movie business: Studio executives have no idea which pictures will make money.

Unless, of course, those pictures are made by Pixar Animation Studios. Since 1995, when the first Toy Story was released, Pixar has made nine films, and every one has been a smashing success.

How It Works

Every Pixar blockbuster requires years of brainstorming and fine-tuning. Every bag of Cheetos tumbles off a highly calibrated production line. Every stand-up comedian develops a unique method for honing jokes. Life’s most interesting action happens behind the scenes—here’s a look at the hidden processes of remarkable things.

Pixar’s secret? Its unusual creative process. Most of the time, a studio assembles a cast of freelance professionals to work on a single project and cuts them loose when the picture is done. At Pixar, a staff of writers, directors, animators, and technicians move from project to project. As a result, the studio has built a team of moviemakers who know and trust one another in ways unimaginable on most sets.

Which explains how they can handle the constant critiques that are at the heart of Pixar’s relentless process. Animation days at the studio all begin the same way: The animators and director gather in a small screening room filled with comfy couches. They eat Cap’n Crunch and drink coffee. Then the team begins analyzing the few seconds of film animated the day before, as they ruthlessly “shred” each frame. Even the most junior staffers are encouraged to join in.

The upper echelons also subject themselves to megadoses of healthy criticism. Every few months, the director of each Pixar film meets with the brain trust, a group of senior creative staff. The purpose of the meeting is to offer comments on the work in progress, and that can lead to some major revisions. “It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up,” says Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3. “We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.”

The proof is in the product. The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million, and the cartoons are critical darlings—the studio has collected 24 Academy Awards. Nobody in Hollywood knows anything. Pixar seems to know everything.

Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3, used to make live-action movies. But the Pixar emphasis on revision has changed his approach to filmmaking. “If I went back to live-action, I’d have to do it the Pixar way,” he says. “If I didn’t, I’d feel like I was walking a tightrope without a net.”

Darla Anderson has produced four Pixar films: A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Cars, and now Toy Story 3. “I’m the pushy mom of producers. I always drive it to the bitter edge,” she says. “I always want it to be better, even if it means throwing something out that we’ve spent months working on.”

Bobby Podesta, supervising animator of Toy Story 3, has been with Pixar since 1997 and, like most animators, considers himself an actor. “My job is to convince you that the stack of polygons on the screen is actually alive,” he says.

Guido Quaroni is the supervising technical director on Toy Story 3. According to him, TS3 was the first film in which the technical team was able to fulfill every animation request from the creative staff. “We never said no to the director,” he says.

The first challenge: coming up with a great story. For inspiration, the creative team leaves the Pixar campus and heads to the Poet’s Loft, a cabin 50 miles north of San Francisco. They thought they already had a great start on the plot for Toy Story 3, but after 20 minutes, the whole thing is scrapped. By day two, a new idea emerges—how would the toys feel if Andy, their owner, left for college?

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Working from a series of plot points, screenwriter Michael Arndt begins drafting the script. At the same time, director Lee Unkrich and the story artists start sketching storyboards for each scene. There is no animation yet, just drawn poses like in a comic book. But the storyboards allow the filmmakers to begin imagining the look and feel of each scene.

Presentation

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So far, the characters exist only as digital illustrations. Character design has begun. Some are sculpted in clay and scanned. Others are drawn by hand. Later, visual textures—fur, fabric, hair—will be added to the form, a step known as simulation. “It’s a constant negotiation with the technical side,” says supervising animator Bobby Podesta. “Not everything we want is possible.”

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The storyboards are turned into what’s called a story reel—a series of images that can be projected for an in-house audience like an elaborate flip book. The lines are prerecorded by Pixar employees. “This is a crucial moment for the film,” says Pixar president and cofounder Ed Catmull. “Watching along with an audience allows us to see what works and what doesn’t.”

Characterization

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Actors start coming in to voice the script. Tom Hanks takes his turn at the Pixar recording studio to lay down his vocal tracks. Hanks reads every line dozens of times, varying his interpretations and emphasis. The sessions are also filmed, so animators can watch the actor’s expressions and use those as reference when they start animating the characters’ faces.

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The shaders are responsible for adding color and texture to characters’ bodies and other surfaces. One issue is the fact that Woody and Buzz are made of plastic: Some plastics are slightly translucent, and they absorb light. So the shaders used a subsurface scattering algorithm to simulate this effect and make the toys look more believable.

Animation

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The pictures are moving. Each character is defined by up to 1,000 avars—points of possible movement—that the animators can manipulate like strings on a puppet. Each morning, the team gathers to review the second or two of film from the day before. The frames are ripped apart as the team searches for ways to make the sequences more expressive.

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The technical challenges start to pile up. (Simulating a wet bear is especially complex.) Good thing Steve Jobs insisted that the building’s essential facilities be centrally located. “Walking to the bathroom or getting a cup of coffee is often the most productive part of my day,” says producer Darla Anderson. “You bump into somebody by accident and then have a conversation that leads to a fix.”

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The animators are working flat out. They stay late into the night in their highly personalized offices, which have been decorated in a variety of themes, from Polynesian tiki to ’70s-era love lounge. (“We let them do whatever they want,” Catmull says.) The animators even have their own working bars, complete with beer on tap and a collection of single-malt whiskeys.

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Rendering—using computer algorithms to generate a final frame—is well under way. The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.

Resolution

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The movie is mostly done. The team has completed 25 of the film’s sequences and is just finishing an action scene that involves a runaway model train, smoke, dust clouds, force fields, lasers, mountainous terrain, and a massive bridge explosion. It has taken 27 technical artists four months to perfect the scene.

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With only weeks to go before the film is released, the audio mixers at Skywalker Sound combine dialog, music, and sound effects. Every nuance is adjusted and re-adjusted. After a four-year production process, it can be hard to let go of Woody, Lotso, Buzz, and the rest of the characters. “We don’t ever finish a film,” Unkrich says. “I could keep on making it better. We’re just forced to release it.”

Building a Single Frame

From simple sketch to polished render.

1 / SKETCHES There are 49,516 of these sketches in the movie’s story reel, which is used as a kind of rough draft of the film. This frame captures the initial excitement of the toys as they arrive at Sunnyside Daycare, their new home.

2 / COLOR SCRIPTS It took art director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi one week to create this impressionistic digital version of the scene. The goal is to begin to define the style and lighting scheme of the frame. Concept art from past movies is on display in the Pixar art gallery.

3 / PROPS Toys are positioned in the 3-D “dressed set.” The TS3 team wanted the nursery to be alive with movement, so hundreds of characters are placed on the shelves. Now the director can fine-tune the camera’s movement to best capture the action.

4 / LAST DETAILS The amount of labor spent on each character depends on its prominence in the final shot. Background toys are given simple textures and basic movements, while Lotso and Woody—the stars of the scene—are lavished with attention.

5 / FINALE Surfaces—walls, clothing, faces—are fed through rendering software that simulates light and shadow. It also adds texture to Lotso’s fur, Barbie’s leggings, and the carpet. An average frame takes more than seven hours of computing time to render. A more complex frame like this one required eleven hours.

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